Gosh. Almost sounds like I know what I'm doing. Ahem.
Admittedly, I visited Zucca quite a while ago, back in the autumn, but seeing as every time I walk past it the place is always full and the food looks so good I want to lick the windows, I don't reckon that it can have changed that much. This restaurant is seriously brilliant, on so many levels.
Firstly, the service is spot on. The staff are really friendly and attentive without going so far as to actually cut up your food and feed it to you, although our waiter nearly had a fit when we pointed out that he had brought us our wine without the water we had also ordered. Bless. Such service meant that our Sunday lunch in a restaurant full of couples, families and small children, usually a potent mixture destined to raise my hackles, was blissfully relaxed and thoroughly enjoyable.
Secondly, the food is beyond brilliant. I would almost go so far as to say that it could bring on a food-gasm, but that may be distasteful to some readers, so I will merely hint at it...
We started with a selection of Italian breads and some olive oil - not usually noteworthy, but this olive oil really is excellent. Lovely and peppery, but without catching you in the back of the throat and making you cough inelegantly, I couldn't get enough of the stuff, so I was very happy to discover that they were also selling it for £10 a bottle, so I'll be buying some once my Spanish 'special treat' oil runs out.
Zucca does starters in a tapas style, with quite a long list of them to mix and match. We went for a puntarelle salad and a plate of Parma ham with figs, drizzled with more of that oil. Puntarelle is quite a bitter leaf, a bit like chicory in flavour, so a mouthful of that with the salty ham and the sweet fig was quite something. My mouth just watered a little bit then, just at the memory of it, I kid you not.
To follow, my mother had monkfish and cima di rapa (which is a bit like broccoli leaves) and I had sea bass with wild mushrooms and salsa verde:
Ooh, mamma. The meaty fish and the piquant sauce were just so good together, I don't know why I don't make this myself. Oh yeah, because sea bass is annoyingly expensive and I'm not a chef.
We finished with coffees and desserts of apple cake and a panna cotta (my favourite Italian pud) with stewed plums, both of which were light and delicious, so that even after three courses, we felt pleasantly plump as opposed to heftily rotund. All of this came to about £60, which is really not bad at all when you look at the quality of the food. I read somewhere that the owners wanted to keep the prices reasonable so that locals would be happy to eat there, rather than pricing them out so that it was only suitable for business lunches and special occasions. I really hope that they keep it this way.
So, that was obviously the good, but what about the other two? The second, sadly, is a restaurant close to Zucca, just across the road in fact, at the Bermondsey Square Hotel. Now, I love Alfie's takeaway - their chips are perfect, their fish is always beautifully cooked and they do something I like to call The Takeaway of Champions, chips with a half-bottle of champagne, total genius. But the restaurant is just bizarre. I went there a while ago with friends and started with a beetroot salad:
Now, I'm not someone who says "Oh no, that looks weird, I don't like it already", I actually love that stuff. Funny little puddles of sauce, architectural piles of veg, I'm all over it. So I was quite excited by all this colour and texture - did you see the blue things? Pickled onion - wondering how to build a forkful of cheese with a slice of beetroot and then get some of that painted on sauce to get all the flavours together...oh, so disappointing. It all just tasted cold and vinegary. And I have no idea when they painted that sauce on as it wouldn't budge, so I have no idea what it tasted like.
My spirits lifted with the arrival of my steak, looking all plump and juicy, but then promptly plummeted when I cut into it. Admittedly, it was done to a turn, a really good medium rare, but I don't know how long they had then left it before serving as it was barely hot and the veg was lukewarm verging on cold. Such a shame as it could have been so good.
The ridiculous is quite ridiculous and just a bit of a joke really. I was in Frankfurt for work a few months ago and had to eat at the airport. The night before, some of us had gone to a proper, non-touristy German restaurant where I'd had schnitzel for the first time, with fried potatoes and a fantastic sauce:
Woof. It was mega, it was tasty, it was a heart attack on a plate, but damn it was good. Could have had another one straight away.
The next day, I flew home but had to eat at the airport. I thought I should probably have a Frankfurter, if only out of politeness, and was served something so hilariously bad, so laughably different from the night before, that I had to take a photo of it:
Still ate it though.
